Stephan: I am sorry, but I have the worst flu I have had in years, and just am not up to doing SR tonight.
-- Stephan
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Stephan: In 2015, as of today, 1125 Americans have been shot and killed by the police who are supposed to protect us. Nearly three a day. By contrast In Great Britain the police fired their weapons just once, and no one was killed. In Norway, the police haven't killed anyone in decade. In the United States the number killed by police in just this year is greater than all of Europe combined.
And that's just the beginning then there are the 644 Americans a week who are shot by other Americans, often family and friends. A little over 33,000 a year. There are war zones with less gun deaths.
Credit: Shutterstock
After conducting a year-long study of police shootings that resulted in death, the Washington Post is reporting that 965 people in the U.S. have been killed by police officers in 2015 — nearly three people every day.
According to the Post, only 90 of the shootings occurred when the suspect was unarmed, with the bulk broken down into three categories: the suspect was wielding a weapon of some sort, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they attempted to flee when officers ordered them to halt.
While the killing of unarmed black men makes up only 4 percent of the police shootings, 40 percent of the shootings involved black male victims — a grossly disproportionate number with African-American males making up only 6 percent of the population.
Attention has grown over those disparate number since the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 at the hands of police officer Darren Wilson. The death of Brown helped launch the Black Lives Matter movement, calling attention to the perceived racism in the […]
Stephan: Here is the latest on the lead poisoning of the people in Flint, Michigan. In turns out the government knew this was happening and for months lied to the people of Flint. Now countless children in Flint have neurological damage due to lead. It all traces back to Governor Rick Snyder. Do I need to tell you he is a Republican.
FLINT, MICHIGAN — After filing a FOIA request, a Virginia Tech professor recently discovered Michigan state officials knew the city of Flint’s water supply was giving children lead poisoning while falsely assuring residents that the water was safe. Although the government had been aware of the increased levels of lead poisoning since July, they continued to lie to the public until a Flint pediatrician published a study in September that found lead exposure in children had doubled citywide and nearly tripled in high-risk areas.
Agreeing to temporarily switch from Detroit’s water supply to the Flint River in April 2014, residents in the city of Flint immediately noticed their tap water appeared cloudy while emitting a pungent odor. After testing the water supply on August 14, 2014, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) discovered the water tested positive for fecal coliform bacteria, also known as E. coli. Although the city issued several boil advisories to kill the bacteria, the CDC has found that heating or boiling water only increases the lead concentration in the water.
In an interview with Michigan Radio on […]
Stephan: This is why I don't think we are going to effectively deal with climate change in the U.S. The racist White fantasy cult that has become the Republican Party is going to do everything they can to block effective remediation.
Republicans didn’t even wait for a global climate change deal to be struck in Paris to start undermining it.
Last month, congressional Republicans were loudly discouraging other nations from signing onto any agreement, arguing that the U.S. won’t keep up its end of the bargain if a Republican wins the 2016 presidential election. And they passed bills that would repeal the Clean Power Plan, the new set of EPA restrictions on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants, which is the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy for meeting its emissions targets under the Paris Agreement.
While U.S. negotiators were hard at work in Paris trying to secure a deal, congressional Republicans kept working hard to make the U.S. look insincere. The House passed an energy bill that would expedite permitting for oil and gas projects such as pipelines and expand liquefied natural gas exports. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is running for president, held a hearing stuffed with climate science deniers, including one who Greenpeace revealed is on the fossil fuel industry’s payroll. Republicans in Congress have also voted to […]
Stephan: The private prison business is a classic example of the corruption of American government as it pertains to the American gulag. Here's why I say that.
credit: occupyforaccountability.org
A senior executive with the second-largest for-profit prison company in America assured investment bankers last summer that despite talk of drug policy and criminal justice reform, the country will continue to “attract crime,” generating new “correctional needs.”
“The reality is, we are a very affluent country, we have loose borders, and we have a bad education system,” said Shayn March, the vice president and treasurer of the Geo Group. “And all that adds up to a significant amount of correctional needs, which, thankfully, we’ve been able to help the country out with and states with by providing a lower cost solution.”
The previously unreported remarks were made during a presentation at the Barclays High Yield Bond & Syndicated Loan conference in June.
While students and activists have protested private prison corporations, scoring a recent victory last week with the decision by the University of California system to divest from firms like Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America, the firms have largely avoided the spotlight.
Private prison companies are a controversial player in America’s criminal justice system. In the 1990s, private prison firms pushed for […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
